‘Moneyball’ author Michael Lewis’s new high-frequency-trading book has crisis-era tinge

Michael Lewis has moved on to other topics since his crisis-era bestseller, “The Big Short,” helped demystify the lead-up to the financial crisis. But it’s clear he’s still thinking about the role the crisis plays in our current markets.

Lewis’s latest book, “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” tells the story of Sergey Aleynikov, a Goldman Sachs
/quotes/zigman/188479/delayed/quotes/nls/gsGS programmer who is sent to jail for stealing Goldman’s high-frequency trading code when he leaves his job at the investment bank. Aleynikov’s story helps explain more broadly the opaque world of HFT. The book is due out Monday. Its publisher is W.W. Norton & Co.

Bloomberg

Michael Lewis.

In a discussion Friday with New York Times contributing writer Diana Henriques at the annual conference of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in Phoenix, Lewis was sparing in details about the new book, but he said the idea — which follows a Vanity Fair article on the subject last fall — stemmed from a simple question:

“It was curious to me that in the aftermath of the greatest financial crisis of modern times” — in which Goldman Sachs played a key role — “the only time someone ends up in jail is when it’s someone that Goldman Sachs wants to put in jail.”

The wide-ranging discussion on Friday touched on Lewis’s other books, including “Moneyball,” which tells the story of how Bill Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, pioneered data crunching to identify undervalued baseball players.

Lewis said the first time he realized that the story he was following was worthy of a book was when he happened to be waiting in the baseball team’s locker room and saw the entire squad naked — a sight he called revolting. Upon mentioning to Beane how unattractive the team was, Lewis received an unlikely reply: That, said Beane, was precisely the point. If the players looked like superb physical specimens, they would be more properly valued by the market. But their undesirable aspects — such as the one player with two clubbed feet — allowed the A’s to create a winning team with a fraction of the payroll of the bigger-market teams. That was Lewis’s lightbulb moment.

Story Conversation

About The Tell

The Tell is MarketWatch’s fast and engaging look at trends and themes in the day’s markets. Drawing on our reporters, analysts and commentators around the world, as well as selecting the best of the rest online, The Tell is all about the pulse of the markets through news, insight and strategic information to help you make the best investing decisions. Got a tip? Tell us at TheTell@MarketWatch.com